Silence and Ego, Roberto and Omar, a Fantasy.

Ego and Silence, Roberto and Omar, A Fantasy 

The more you live, the more you realize the more stupid and ignorant a person, the more likely he speaks nonsense in defending his fragile, petty, inconsequential ego. Upon reflection, you would see that he does not have much to defend. That's why he is very touchy about his meager ego which is a pathetic constellation of unfulfilled desires, fanciful wishes, and midnight wet dreams. He hems and haws and makes a fool of himself, thinking he's somebody and that he's left a mark for posterity. He hungers for fame and lusts after power while the truth of the matter is that he is a big zero, a nothing, a stupid and ignorant bumpkin fellow who loves making noises to attract attention. He can't sit still. Silence is foreign to him. 

In addition, the asshole, whose totem must be a jackass, loves being sarcastic. His propensity for sarcasm used to bother you, but not anymore. You now see him for what he is: a fly that eats shit and bothers  people. You are now beyond homicidal rage. You have ascended to silence. You can't bear to hear nonsense and stupidity and ignorance coming out of monkeys' mouths. This beautiful planet is being overrun by simians. The only thing you can have silence is not to talk with simians. Just tune them out. Look at them and laugh your head off inside. Say, if you have one week left to live, would you waste your precious energy to talk with monkeys and jackasses? No way, right? In fact, if you had  power and resources, you no doubt would blow their motherfucking heads off. That's what I would do. 

You probably know by now that the stories and tales told by me aren't usually sweet and harmonious. Instead, they smack and smell of bewilderment and confusion, inchoate anger and near-madness, obsessions and dreams, the stuff nobody really wants to know and read about. More importantly, perhaps, they are about thwarted and unfulfilled loves and screaming, suffocating silence. If what I just wrote is a shade and a shadow beyond your understanding and you're shivering and shuddering in anticipation of a breakthrough, I don't really blame you. For years I had stood in fear and trembling of the specter of a thing called love until a few months ago I had a revelation that while love was real and beautiful for a lucky few, to me it was forever an illusion. And yet I keep writing sappy, romantic love poetry. Ironic, isn't it? Last week, I changed my will. I erased the names of three individuals whom I determined unworthy of my love.They were selfish. All they cared about were themselves. They talked a good game of love, but their actions indicated otherwise. Ego is an ugly thing. Selfishness smacks and smells of animalism. 

You (first and second singular pronouns in this piece and many others of mine are interchangeable) woke up from a dream. Lonely and sad and confused, you called Omar, a dear friend of yours, up and asked for his comments. Omar is a modern-day Renaissance man and an assassin. He reads widely and has a keen understanding of the human mind. He said:

-Roberto, wake up. You're an old fool. Don't you see she's fucking with your mind? Stop dreaming impossible dreams. Only fools do that. I admit you're difficult to understand and harder to love, but you must maintain a high standard. Work on your writing and learning languages. Take care of your health. Stay away from monkeys and jackasses. They would just annoy and anger you. Unlike them, you're no scoundrel. Those who think you are, don't know you and are fucking imbeciles. Life is unfair. Some are born smart and sensitive; most are born stupid and stay stupid. Don't hang around with stupid and ignorant people. Sooner or later, they would say or do something that offends you. Life is too short to feel offended all the time. Besides, you're not that strong to take offenses. Capisci? (not "capisce", as most fools would use. Capisce is used formally to address second person. I know capisce as an American slang, has degenerated and degraded the original meaning in Italian. The same thing has happened with the au courant 'no problemo' used by Americans who don't know shit about Spanish. The correct usage is 'no problema') 

You feel okay? Want to travel with me next Saturday to Chicago? I have a "job" there waiting for me. I've done a thorough research. It would take three days to a week to put finishing touches to it. You wouldn't have to do anything. Just sight-seeing and staying in a hotel-room, watching TV or reading books. That'd be a nice change of pace for you, a break from the rut of cooping up in that high-rise condo and fantasizing that this woman or that woman is falling for your "charms". Traveling with me would help you confront naked, real, brutal, arbitrary  realities where people die violently, for their sins, for their being an inconvenience or an obstacle of somebody's ambitions and greed or just being at the wrong place at the wrong time. A taste of death at close range would make you appreciate life more, even from the distance. Of course, you don't have to pay for anything. I need a "traveling companion" to relieve me of the "existential loneliness" that's been weighing hard on me lately.

-I'd have to think about that. I hate to be a "collateral damage" while you're carrying out your "duties". But what's this shit about "existential loneliness" that you're talking about? I thought you were above that. 

-Nobody is, Roberto. Nobody. If they say they are, they're lying. I'd bet you that the Pope's lonely. Ditto Obama. Putin. Assad. The only humans that are not lonely are kids under six. They're too young to feel it, to have that consciousness. What they have instead is separation anxiety if being away from their caretakers. 

-Okay,  "professor". Seriously, I thought with your "knowledge", "savoir-faire" and "savoir-vivre", a commonality like "existential loneliness" wouldn't bother you, but apparently it does. Then tell me, frankly, what do you live for? What makes you wake up in the morning and decide to go through the whole day without giving into the temptation of putting a bullet through your head? 

-Roberto, there's not a single day I don't think of Death, the finality that puts an end to our absurd, arbitrary, gratuitous existence on this planet. I think of Death not so much because of my "profession" but as the result of a careful confrontation with and examination of various metaphysical questions: God, why I'm here on this planet and in this world, and what I should do with my life.

You already know what I think of the notion God as an entity that has an interest in the welfare of earthlings. I definitely have a firm, adamantine conviction that those who believe in a Personal God are stupid or cowardly or both because all the empirical evidence points out in a very crystal clear direction that the entity called God is man-made and an exercise in wishful thinking and willful delusion. 

With God not being part of the equation we call Life, Life becomes impersonal, arbitrary, and meaningless by itself. It is up to us---humans mostly if not exclusively because I really doubt if subhumans have an awareness beforehand of their inevitable death ---to create, to make up the meaning of our existence. Each human goes to the business of making up the meaning by himself, ideally speaking, but the reality is that for most humans who have the slave mentality, the meaning of life is already made up for them by the mind controllers: their religious and political "leaders". 

Of course, I am not part of that majority. I never was and I never will be. I live out of curiosity. I want to know what I am really made of. Thus, I put myself in extreme situations to test myself. I also want to know about what will take place in the near term, in my life span. I have to eat. I have to earn my daily bread, but I don't want to feel like a cog in a machine, a slave in a modern-day corporation, a farmer whose livelihood depends on the weather and economic forces. So I opt to be a hunter. Everybody has to die, sooner or later, if not at my hand, then at somebody else's or by illness or accident. If I don't carry out the contract, somebody else would. That's the nature of the business, of the world. The question of "morality" does crop up from time to time because of my penchant and predisposition to metaphysics and ethics and fairness and justice, but I "solve" it by deriving no "pleasure" from my "work", just like a munitions worker who has no qualms of contributing to destruction and death in faraway places. He does his job because he has to eat. If he does not take the job, somebody will. He can choose another job if his conscience bothers him. I chose to be a hired killer because I was trained to be a killer by the government to protect the vested interests. I used to kill for some faceless bureaucrats and businessmen and politicians. Now I kill for my benefits. But I do thorough research. Almost all of my targets deserved to die. I have turned down job offers when I feel something fishy is going on. And I don't do work that involves women and children. Listen, most assholes in this world think that my line of work is despicable, but they assassinate the character of the people they don't like by spreading false, malicious rumors and innuendos. They bring destruction to the lives of many people by their sheer everyday conduct in the form of deception, lying, and hypocrisy. Those assholes are truly animals. Every time I hear one of them or their loved ones get mortally sick or meet some unfortunate accident, I feel overjoyed and I go to a bar quietly celebrating. Yes, I do have Schadenfreude in abundance. Call me Omar. Call me Ishmael. Call me amoral and heartless. Call me whatever name you want. But don't call me a liar because if you do, I probably have to pay you a visit. Capisci?

But I spoke too much, too frankly, and in too personal terms. I'm tired, Roberto, very tired. Too much blood for too easy money. I sometimes feel I have to speak very softly, when I must speak at all,  because I'm afraid I'd wake up the dead. I've tried to rationalize that if I hadn't taken the jobs, somebody else would have taken them anyway, but the rationalization is getting old. 

(To be continued)